She emerged from the stall like an angel, a streamer of toilet paper trailing from one heel like a glittering train.
It was her calves I fell in love with. Killer calves, I’m telling you—stocking-clad and firm, highlighted by a serious pair of rhinestone-studded heels strapped to her ankles. Those calves could have reached out and strangled someone if they weren’t so well-mannered, I swear. (Not that I personally ever tried provoking them, but I suspect they were more than capable.) Those calves, framed on one end by toes turned oh-so-slightly inward and on the other by knees just hidden by the delicate line of a gloriously hideous mustard-yellow skirt, were a masterpiece.
Now, I must admit: I’m not a stocking wearer. Never have been. I probably have a few pairs shoved in the back of my sock drawer, left over from Easter Sundays and the synthetic Christianity of my childhood, but I can’t tell you when I last forced myself into a pair. It’s too depressing to think about what size I’d have to wear these days, anyway. But God damn, Emma wore stockings like they were tubes of nylon sin. Like they were made for her (or her for them?). Even my drink-fogged, drug-muddled brain knew enough to perk up and take notice, etching her wavering calves in its memory from my spot on the bathroom floor of Johnny Ninety-Nine’s.
“Are you alright?” She emerged from the stall like an angel, a streamer of toilet paper trailing from one heel like a glittering train, and if her calves were first, her voice…her voice was second, third, fourth and fifth. Like a car crunching sweetly over gravel that’s been smoking since it turned fifteen. Emma’s voice was what I’d always expected to hear on one of those phone sex hotlines they’re always advertising between four AM infomercials. A classy one, of course—a classy phone sex hotline. Nothing, never anything less for Emma.
“Th’fug?”
“Are you alright? Should I go get someone?”
Say I never went to Johnny’s that night. Say I decided on The High Bar, down the street, or on an intimate night-in with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a little something extra. Say I never found myself waxing poetic about a pair of bathroom-calves. What would have changed? I wouldn’t have met Frank five years later at the all-you-can-eat sushi bar downtown, and consequently my two daughters would have been flushed down the toilet with the rest of my once-monthly gift from God. The refrigerator we bought from Sears (the one that vengefully blew up half our kitchen only three months later) would have, most likely, gone on to plague a different household. With any luck, the neighbors who get a kick out of letting their dog crap on our lawn every morning would have perished in an unfortunate but unavoidable accident, or, at the very least, found someone else to bother. Is it true that sometimes people stumble into your life for a reason?
“I’m going to get the bartender. You look like you’re about to keel over, honey.”
“…Faks.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘thank you’.”
I like to think she picked me up and swept me off to the hospital with her bare hands, pedaling her bicycle like the wind (Are you kidding me? With calves like that, it had to be a bicycle.) but I’m a realistic gal. She probably had help carrying me over to her Schwinn. We never talked about it, and I’ve always preferred living in a happy delusion than being smacked with the truth. Life might provide you with embarrassments, but you certainly don’t have to dwell on them. Whatever actually happened, I woke up at Saint Bernard’s General Saturday morning with nothing to show for my encounter but an explosive hang-over and a bill totaling three hundred dollars for services rendered. Had she been an angel after all? Did her duties as a member of the heavenly host rip her from my side before we’d even truly met? Not that I could blame her for moving on to greener pastures, really—I’m not even a practicing Catholic.
It wasn’t until several days later that my sore wallet and I decided to go back to Johnny Ninety-Nine’s, hoping we might find some clue that would lead me to her (A misplaced rhinestone from her glorious shoes? A strand of black hair?). To be honest, Johnny’s was the kind of place that I usually tried to avoid during the day. At night, an excess of people and never-ending booze turned it into an oasis from the rest of the world, a place where you could pretend to be wildly sexy without realizing that you’ve simply lowered your standards, but in the stark light of day the grunge was impossible to ignore.
“Jesus, Kris. Didn’t think I’d be seeing you in here again, after Friday night. Gotta admit, figured you’d be fucked up for weeks.” Like his bar, Johnny Franklin had never pretended to be classy. The glint of metal in his mouth and the unabashed way he stared at my chest reinforced this. (I didn’t need it reinforced.)
“Yeah, rub that in a little more, Johnny. Go ahead,” I replied, unimpressed. “Anyway, do you know the name of the woman who helped me out? You know, the one who tipped you off?”
“The lady who sent you to the hospital?” He scratched the back of his head, hesitating. “Listen, if you’re aiming to get her to pay your bill or some shit, you got another thing coming. Emma’s a good gal—she don’t need to be hassled none. You’d still be face down in the john, wasn’t for her.”
“I know that, Johnny. I want to thank her for what she did. If I can believe those shmucks at Saint Bernie’s, she saved my life. You said her name’s Emma?”
“Sure. She’s a regular around here. Emma Emile. I couldn’t tell you where she lives, but I doubt it’s too hard to figure out, with a name like that.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
҉
It was raining the night I finally tracked her down, Boston spitting profusely on whoever was unfortunate enough to be stuck outside. As it turned out, there were any number of potential Emma Emiles in the phonebook—from E. Emile to Emma E. to Emma Emile Parker and everything in between. Emma E. Fortune, the first women in the directory and thus the first one on my list, lived at Twenty-Three Seventy-Four Grisfolk Lane, in one of the new Boston subdivisions that masquerade as proper housing. At ninety-one years old, Mrs. Fortune had been widowed twice, given birth ten times, and been indirectly responsible for the creation of twenty plus screaming grandbabies who ranged from lawyers to pediatric surgeons to burger monkeys at McDonald’s. I swear, I didn’t plan on staying, but Mrs. Fortune’s raspberry almond shortbread cookies presented a solid case. I still dream about those damn things.
Emma and Emile Mendoza lived downtown, and I’d been hoping for a home-run since their apartment was only a few blocks up from Johnny’s, but I should’ve known better. I’ve never been that lucky.
“Sí? Qué quieres?”
“I think I’ve got the wrong address.”
“Sí. Creo que sí.”
When I finally found the right door and rang the right doorbell, clutching a bouquet of waterlogged lilies that had initially been quite beautiful, I suppose I should have been happy that my angel didn’t immediately call the police. I could only smile desperately and hope that I looked more appealing than I had the last time we’d met—if you could even call that a meeting.
“Hi!” I held out the lilies like a shield, protecting me from her casually raised (perfectly shaped) eyebrow and her secretive smile. “Do you remember me? I’m that girl you helped out last week? At Johnny’s?”
“How could I forget?” Her voice was just as I’d captured it in my memory.
“Yeah. Listen, I’m really sorry to barge in on your Thursday night like this, and I’m sure you don’t appreciate me invading your privacy, but I just had to see you. I can’t stop thinking about what you did for me last weekend.”
This, admittedly, wasn’t entirely true. Not an outright light, but definitely a conscious misdirection. I didn’t give one shit that she’d been sober enough to send me to the hospital; what I couldn’t stop thinking about was the way she’d come out of that stall like sex on two legs. I picked out lilies because I thought they’d be appropriate for either interpretation.
“Well, I’m glad you appreciated my help, but I honestly didn’t do much.”
“I just want to say thank you. Really. That’s it.” Again, if not entirely true, true enough to be getting on with. (Is 54% true good enough?)
She sighed.
“Well, I’ve just pulled some bread out of the over—you’re welcome to stick around and have some with me. It’s terribly delicious with honey.”
There’s another world out there, you know. One where an offer of waterlogged lilies and a reciprocation of warm bread means something significant. As someone who had previously labored in the world of perfect straightness (until an enlightening encounter on the floor of a certain sleazy bar) I wasn’t aware that, within Emma’s realm, the offer was an implicit invitation for an entirely different activity. In hindsight, I can’t say I was entirely disappointed that we never actually got around to the bread.
҉--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Oh, where are my manners! I never thought to ask your name.”
(Number thirty-six: the cow-lick she got from pressing her head too firmly to the pillow)
“Kris.”
“I’m Emma. Emma Emile.
҉--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If her calves were the first (and held their position by a mile, always) and her voice was second through fifth, there were a million other things that held a million other places. Like her eyes, even more stunning when not viewed through a visor of Jose Cuervo—deep brown with tiny flecks of green, like the mottled inside of a drain. That ridiculous infatuation Emma insisted on having for Frank Sinatra despite my observation that he probably wasn’t looking so hot anymore. How she’d laugh at those models on TV commercials scattered amidst Lifetime movies, saying she’d rather be fat and sexy than eat nothing but rice crackers and die like a nun. Not that she was fat, of course, but you’ll never hear me arguing with sexy.
Her stockings were color coordinated. (I should have known that killer calves like hers would demand an altar.) They hung from a rack in her closet like several dozen wealthy but decapitated sock puppets, waiting to be taken out and abused, all the while knowing that they were damn well going to enjoy it. That’s what Emma was—an arsenal of stockings. An army of loyal followers practically begging her to trample them. A universe of golden stars on the ceiling, painted with the help of a DIY tutorial and a Yukon Gold potato.
҉--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“You know, I thought you were pretty disgusting the first time I saw you.”
“I can imagine,” I said, reaching across her naked stomach to snag a grape from the bowl resting against her hip. “I don’t make a habit of passing out in bathrooms. You caught me on a bad day.”
“I would very much hope so, or I’ve made a terrible mistake,” she replied. A well-manicured finger hooked into the bowl and tugged it out of my reach.
Back then, her apartment faced east, and in the morning the sun beat in through the window and bathed her. Every evening was a battle of wills over the curtains—she liked them open, and I (the sane one in our relationship), liked sleep enough to want them closed—which she won unerringly. We never got a chance to talk about her family, but her skin was golden and gleaming in a way that mine, cursed by an Irish grandmother and an aversion to the beach, never would be. The mornings were her time, time when she could talk and I would listen (if only for the sake of watching her lips caress the words) and she could recharge like the angel I swear she was. The nighttime was for me.
“How dare you. Bring those back.”
“Only if you’ll give me a kiss.”
(Her smile was number ten.)
“You drive a hard bargain, Em. A damn hard bargain.”
҉--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I could say something tacky about the two years I spent with Emma. Talk about how they were the best years of my life, how I wouldn’t have bothered getting up from that skuzzy bathroom floor if it weren’t for the beautiful calves attached to a beautiful woman who woke me up with kisses and soft, manicured hands. The girl who slept like the dead and loved afternoon naps. The girl who dreamt of dancing with Ol’ Blue Eyes and loved having a hand around her waist. (It wouldn’t be hard to come up with a thousand things, and a thousand thousand more). Should I tell you about the one-legged duck at City Park that we’d named Gertrude? Should I tell you about the night we paid homage to Gertrude (who’d been killed by a fox on a particularly muggy night in August, poor thing) by slow-roasting her in a succulent orange glaze? I should also remind you of that husband I mentioned earlier, and those two little girls. Remember them?
“What were you doing at Johnny’s that night, Em? Why were you even there?”
“The same reason you were. I was doing the same thing every single person in that damn bar was doing—looking for something.”
“Did you find it?”
Should I tell you that Emma’s calves looked just as glorious when bare of stockings? That it wouldn’t matter if you took away the rhinestones and the mustard-yellow and the bowl of grapes and left her with nothing, because there was a secret hiding behind her smile? She knew, and I slowly began to understand, that the only important thing was the sun on her bare legs in the morning, curious fingers of heaven teasing up her nightgown.
“Did you?”
Now, I must admit: I’m not a stocking wearer. Never have been. I probably have a few pairs shoved in the back of my sock drawer, left over from Easter Sundays and the synthetic Christianity of my childhood, but I can’t tell you when I last forced myself into a pair. It’s too depressing to think about what size I’d have to wear these days, anyway. But God damn, Emma wore stockings like they were tubes of nylon sin. Like they were made for her (or her for them?). Even my drink-fogged, drug-muddled brain knew enough to perk up and take notice, etching her wavering calves in its memory from my spot on the bathroom floor of Johnny Ninety-Nine’s.
“Are you alright?” She emerged from the stall like an angel, a streamer of toilet paper trailing from one heel like a glittering train, and if her calves were first, her voice…her voice was second, third, fourth and fifth. Like a car crunching sweetly over gravel that’s been smoking since it turned fifteen. Emma’s voice was what I’d always expected to hear on one of those phone sex hotlines they’re always advertising between four AM infomercials. A classy one, of course—a classy phone sex hotline. Nothing, never anything less for Emma.
“Th’fug?”
“Are you alright? Should I go get someone?”
Say I never went to Johnny’s that night. Say I decided on The High Bar, down the street, or on an intimate night-in with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a little something extra. Say I never found myself waxing poetic about a pair of bathroom-calves. What would have changed? I wouldn’t have met Frank five years later at the all-you-can-eat sushi bar downtown, and consequently my two daughters would have been flushed down the toilet with the rest of my once-monthly gift from God. The refrigerator we bought from Sears (the one that vengefully blew up half our kitchen only three months later) would have, most likely, gone on to plague a different household. With any luck, the neighbors who get a kick out of letting their dog crap on our lawn every morning would have perished in an unfortunate but unavoidable accident, or, at the very least, found someone else to bother. Is it true that sometimes people stumble into your life for a reason?
“I’m going to get the bartender. You look like you’re about to keel over, honey.”
“…Faks.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘thank you’.”
I like to think she picked me up and swept me off to the hospital with her bare hands, pedaling her bicycle like the wind (Are you kidding me? With calves like that, it had to be a bicycle.) but I’m a realistic gal. She probably had help carrying me over to her Schwinn. We never talked about it, and I’ve always preferred living in a happy delusion than being smacked with the truth. Life might provide you with embarrassments, but you certainly don’t have to dwell on them. Whatever actually happened, I woke up at Saint Bernard’s General Saturday morning with nothing to show for my encounter but an explosive hang-over and a bill totaling three hundred dollars for services rendered. Had she been an angel after all? Did her duties as a member of the heavenly host rip her from my side before we’d even truly met? Not that I could blame her for moving on to greener pastures, really—I’m not even a practicing Catholic.
It wasn’t until several days later that my sore wallet and I decided to go back to Johnny Ninety-Nine’s, hoping we might find some clue that would lead me to her (A misplaced rhinestone from her glorious shoes? A strand of black hair?). To be honest, Johnny’s was the kind of place that I usually tried to avoid during the day. At night, an excess of people and never-ending booze turned it into an oasis from the rest of the world, a place where you could pretend to be wildly sexy without realizing that you’ve simply lowered your standards, but in the stark light of day the grunge was impossible to ignore.
“Jesus, Kris. Didn’t think I’d be seeing you in here again, after Friday night. Gotta admit, figured you’d be fucked up for weeks.” Like his bar, Johnny Franklin had never pretended to be classy. The glint of metal in his mouth and the unabashed way he stared at my chest reinforced this. (I didn’t need it reinforced.)
“Yeah, rub that in a little more, Johnny. Go ahead,” I replied, unimpressed. “Anyway, do you know the name of the woman who helped me out? You know, the one who tipped you off?”
“The lady who sent you to the hospital?” He scratched the back of his head, hesitating. “Listen, if you’re aiming to get her to pay your bill or some shit, you got another thing coming. Emma’s a good gal—she don’t need to be hassled none. You’d still be face down in the john, wasn’t for her.”
“I know that, Johnny. I want to thank her for what she did. If I can believe those shmucks at Saint Bernie’s, she saved my life. You said her name’s Emma?”
“Sure. She’s a regular around here. Emma Emile. I couldn’t tell you where she lives, but I doubt it’s too hard to figure out, with a name like that.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
҉
It was raining the night I finally tracked her down, Boston spitting profusely on whoever was unfortunate enough to be stuck outside. As it turned out, there were any number of potential Emma Emiles in the phonebook—from E. Emile to Emma E. to Emma Emile Parker and everything in between. Emma E. Fortune, the first women in the directory and thus the first one on my list, lived at Twenty-Three Seventy-Four Grisfolk Lane, in one of the new Boston subdivisions that masquerade as proper housing. At ninety-one years old, Mrs. Fortune had been widowed twice, given birth ten times, and been indirectly responsible for the creation of twenty plus screaming grandbabies who ranged from lawyers to pediatric surgeons to burger monkeys at McDonald’s. I swear, I didn’t plan on staying, but Mrs. Fortune’s raspberry almond shortbread cookies presented a solid case. I still dream about those damn things.
Emma and Emile Mendoza lived downtown, and I’d been hoping for a home-run since their apartment was only a few blocks up from Johnny’s, but I should’ve known better. I’ve never been that lucky.
“Sí? Qué quieres?”
“I think I’ve got the wrong address.”
“Sí. Creo que sí.”
When I finally found the right door and rang the right doorbell, clutching a bouquet of waterlogged lilies that had initially been quite beautiful, I suppose I should have been happy that my angel didn’t immediately call the police. I could only smile desperately and hope that I looked more appealing than I had the last time we’d met—if you could even call that a meeting.
“Hi!” I held out the lilies like a shield, protecting me from her casually raised (perfectly shaped) eyebrow and her secretive smile. “Do you remember me? I’m that girl you helped out last week? At Johnny’s?”
“How could I forget?” Her voice was just as I’d captured it in my memory.
“Yeah. Listen, I’m really sorry to barge in on your Thursday night like this, and I’m sure you don’t appreciate me invading your privacy, but I just had to see you. I can’t stop thinking about what you did for me last weekend.”
This, admittedly, wasn’t entirely true. Not an outright light, but definitely a conscious misdirection. I didn’t give one shit that she’d been sober enough to send me to the hospital; what I couldn’t stop thinking about was the way she’d come out of that stall like sex on two legs. I picked out lilies because I thought they’d be appropriate for either interpretation.
“Well, I’m glad you appreciated my help, but I honestly didn’t do much.”
“I just want to say thank you. Really. That’s it.” Again, if not entirely true, true enough to be getting on with. (Is 54% true good enough?)
She sighed.
“Well, I’ve just pulled some bread out of the over—you’re welcome to stick around and have some with me. It’s terribly delicious with honey.”
There’s another world out there, you know. One where an offer of waterlogged lilies and a reciprocation of warm bread means something significant. As someone who had previously labored in the world of perfect straightness (until an enlightening encounter on the floor of a certain sleazy bar) I wasn’t aware that, within Emma’s realm, the offer was an implicit invitation for an entirely different activity. In hindsight, I can’t say I was entirely disappointed that we never actually got around to the bread.
҉--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Oh, where are my manners! I never thought to ask your name.”
(Number thirty-six: the cow-lick she got from pressing her head too firmly to the pillow)
“Kris.”
“I’m Emma. Emma Emile.
҉--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If her calves were the first (and held their position by a mile, always) and her voice was second through fifth, there were a million other things that held a million other places. Like her eyes, even more stunning when not viewed through a visor of Jose Cuervo—deep brown with tiny flecks of green, like the mottled inside of a drain. That ridiculous infatuation Emma insisted on having for Frank Sinatra despite my observation that he probably wasn’t looking so hot anymore. How she’d laugh at those models on TV commercials scattered amidst Lifetime movies, saying she’d rather be fat and sexy than eat nothing but rice crackers and die like a nun. Not that she was fat, of course, but you’ll never hear me arguing with sexy.
Her stockings were color coordinated. (I should have known that killer calves like hers would demand an altar.) They hung from a rack in her closet like several dozen wealthy but decapitated sock puppets, waiting to be taken out and abused, all the while knowing that they were damn well going to enjoy it. That’s what Emma was—an arsenal of stockings. An army of loyal followers practically begging her to trample them. A universe of golden stars on the ceiling, painted with the help of a DIY tutorial and a Yukon Gold potato.
҉--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“You know, I thought you were pretty disgusting the first time I saw you.”
“I can imagine,” I said, reaching across her naked stomach to snag a grape from the bowl resting against her hip. “I don’t make a habit of passing out in bathrooms. You caught me on a bad day.”
“I would very much hope so, or I’ve made a terrible mistake,” she replied. A well-manicured finger hooked into the bowl and tugged it out of my reach.
Back then, her apartment faced east, and in the morning the sun beat in through the window and bathed her. Every evening was a battle of wills over the curtains—she liked them open, and I (the sane one in our relationship), liked sleep enough to want them closed—which she won unerringly. We never got a chance to talk about her family, but her skin was golden and gleaming in a way that mine, cursed by an Irish grandmother and an aversion to the beach, never would be. The mornings were her time, time when she could talk and I would listen (if only for the sake of watching her lips caress the words) and she could recharge like the angel I swear she was. The nighttime was for me.
“How dare you. Bring those back.”
“Only if you’ll give me a kiss.”
(Her smile was number ten.)
“You drive a hard bargain, Em. A damn hard bargain.”
҉--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I could say something tacky about the two years I spent with Emma. Talk about how they were the best years of my life, how I wouldn’t have bothered getting up from that skuzzy bathroom floor if it weren’t for the beautiful calves attached to a beautiful woman who woke me up with kisses and soft, manicured hands. The girl who slept like the dead and loved afternoon naps. The girl who dreamt of dancing with Ol’ Blue Eyes and loved having a hand around her waist. (It wouldn’t be hard to come up with a thousand things, and a thousand thousand more). Should I tell you about the one-legged duck at City Park that we’d named Gertrude? Should I tell you about the night we paid homage to Gertrude (who’d been killed by a fox on a particularly muggy night in August, poor thing) by slow-roasting her in a succulent orange glaze? I should also remind you of that husband I mentioned earlier, and those two little girls. Remember them?
“What were you doing at Johnny’s that night, Em? Why were you even there?”
“The same reason you were. I was doing the same thing every single person in that damn bar was doing—looking for something.”
“Did you find it?”
Should I tell you that Emma’s calves looked just as glorious when bare of stockings? That it wouldn’t matter if you took away the rhinestones and the mustard-yellow and the bowl of grapes and left her with nothing, because there was a secret hiding behind her smile? She knew, and I slowly began to understand, that the only important thing was the sun on her bare legs in the morning, curious fingers of heaven teasing up her nightgown.
“Did you?”